Sunday, October 2, 2016

Interactive Music Score Engraving

This is a short post about a JavaScript library I've recently discovered for producing music scores called VexFlow. It includes a language for defining score layouts called VexTab. Although this is still under development, it is complete enough to give me about 95% of what I need for displaying scores of simple traditional melodies. The main features that are missing at the moment are:
  • Changing time signature or key signature mid-stave
  • First and second repeats
  • Displaying quadruplets in compound time accurately
I have recently written an elm wrapper for VexTab and a translation from ABC notation into VexTab. I already have an editor for ABC notation that re-parses after every character (and thus makes it available to a player). It has thus been straightforward to add interactive score generation - i.e. the score grows as each character is typed. If you are interested, you can try it here.